Conflicting Perspectives - Julius Caesar and the Human Condition

Analyse the ways conflicting perspectives generate diverse and provocative insights.
In your response, make detailed reference to your prescribed text and at least one other related text of your own choosing.
Conflicting perspectives in texts provide a deeper understanding and insight on characters, situations and events. Representations of conflicting perspectives in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda (2004) (based on true events) and Trent Hayes’ political commentary “1st Australian PM – Rudd and Gillard backstabbing coup farce – who are we voting for?” generate insights about the human condition by showing us how perspectives can shift and change due to individuals’ interaction with the wider world. The representation of conflicting perspectives also generates insights about the extent to which idealism can succeed in the world of politics.
Shakespeare represents Brutus’s conflicting perspectives of Caesar to show the way in which perspectives are susceptible to manipulation through persuasion. We are first presented with Brutus’s troubled perspective of Caesar, revealed in a dialogue with Cassius: ‘[I fear his acceptance of the crown] yet I love him well.” The tender word “love” conveys Brutus’s affection for Caesar, and his resulting unwillingness to act against him. After Cassius’s crafty exploitation of Brutus’s patriotic values (“There was a Brutus once that would [forbidden the devil himself] to keep his state in Rome / As easily as a king”), we are presented with a conflicting perspective of Brutus as a man convinced that Caesar must be eliminated: “it must be by his death ... [we shall] kill him in his shell.” The high modality of ‘must’ and the metaphor comparing Caesar to a serpent (a creature that symbolises the opposite of love) shows the extent to which Cassius has altered Brutus’s perspective. Thus, conflicting perspectives here demonstrate the insight that humans’ perceptions are always vulnerable to manipulation....